By Jim Hagarty
1988
Some staunch defenders of free enterprise, offended by heritage conservationists, now and then sound strong warnings about the threat to our economic system and our very way of life posed by those meddlesome busybodies who have nothing better to do with their days than run around the towns of this nation trying to save old buildings. The rights of property owners are under siege, they warn. The owners of businesses should be able to do whatever they want to do with their places without interference from anyone, they argue. Economic ruin awaits us, they predict, if we don’t stop this blight of preservation from eating away the leaves on the capitalistic tree of life.
The logic of such “sky is falling” rhetoric might pass the test of common sense but for several reasons. First of all, there is very little “free enterprise” left in this country for anyone – heritage lovers or not – to take away. Governments are involved in almost every aspect of business, industry and the professions today and that presence is increasing, not diminishing, as recent legislation regarding such issues as smoking, safety in the workplace, pollution and pay equity shows.
Secondly, towns and cities which have voluntarily embraced heritage conservation as a way to both enhance the quality of life in their communities and attract outside trade and commerce are not dying on the vine but in fact, are leaving behind those places too set in their ways to consider anything but the “knock it down and replace it” concept of development.
Thirdly, architects working on everything from large new hotels and homes to small new additions to existing business building are climbing on the heritage train, incorporating arches, round windows, false fronts, brick siding, ornate light standards and all sorts of other popular 19th century building techniques or offshoots of them into their 20th century designs. So old, old-looking buildings which are knocked down now are likely to be replaced by new, old-looking buildings at considerable cost and questionable gain.
But the major flaw in the call to let us an do our own thing unrestricted in any way by government and its citizens in this matter of the preservation of heritage architecture or the destruction of it is the way this appeal ignores the sad lessons in other areas of Canadian life and how we’re now paying and may pay for many more years for the mistakes made during the decades of too few controls. Some careless industrialists and farmers and of course, the general public, allowed to carry on without restrictions or at best with very few, have given us an environment which now may be permanently damaged. Totally free enterprise has given us acid rain, poisoned lakes and rivers, eroded soil, urban development on good agricultural land and something called the greenhouse effect. Much of this damage, experts say, is irreversible.
What we need to do as the 20th century comes to a close is to keep those things from the past which are still of value and throw away those things which have ceased to serve us well, including attitudes and practices.
Municipal planners, elected officials, business people and private citizens alike should work at preserving the beauty of the best of our historic architecture and give up the brave but foolish notion that a few dollars and a signature on a document entitles us to do whatever we like with property we have had the good fortune to be able to buy.
Twenty-five years ago, environmentalists were crackpots and hippies. Now, we know they were, in many cases, visionaries. Will we also have to wait 25 years to discover with regret that heritage preservationists, too, were right all along?
